The Administration of the United States has decided that, to properly defend the nation against attacks by rogue nations, it is vital that the US withdraw from a number of international agreements limiting its capacity to create and trade in armaments. Among them are:

• The US-Russia Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty: bans national missile defence systems and restrains most systems for weaponising space. If a single step is taken to implement Mr. Bush's missile defense program, this treaty is toast.
• START: Russian and US nuclear weapons. Mr. Bush has indicated he favours reduction in nuclear warheads, but shows a preference for voluntary unilateral rather than legally binding agreed cuts.
• The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: bans all types of nuclear explosions in any environment. It needs the ratification of the U.S. and 43 other named states. So far, 161 states have signed it, including the US, and 79 signators have ratified it. Of the named states necessary for the treaty to come into force, 31 have ratified, but not the US.

• The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention: bans development, production, stockpiling, acquisition, transfer or retention of all biological weapons and mandates their destruction. The US has announced it is not prepared to continue negotiations to create a compliance and inspection regime. The convention has 140+ parties. The compliance negotiations have been going on since 1995, based on a mandate established with strong US participation. Without the US, this negotiation is dead, the convention toothless. The U.S. has argued two points: first, that the compliance agreement is insufficiently intrusive to make rogue states reveal their secrets, but is too intrusive for the United States to tolerate.
• The Small Arms Programme of Action is not a treaty but a statement of principles and an action plan for almost 200 nations. The US position is highly conservative on areas such as domestic civilian possession of small arms and criteria for exports that might limit national security initiatives -- areas where action was supported by a strong majority of other delegations. The US did agree in the end, but only after it got its way on these and other issues, thus rendering the programme, again, fairly toothless.
• The Ottawa Landmines Convention: bans production and transfer of anti-personnel mines and mandates destruction of existing stocks. At present, it has 133 signators, of which 118 have ratified the treaty. The US has neither signed nor ratified.

What reasons has the US given for this wholesale rejection of multilateral weapons control? Treaties are rejected because they are unenforceable, compromise the sovereignty of the United States, or threaten its ability to protect itself against rogue nations.

It is true that many of the threatened agreements are relatively toothless, or difficult to enforce. The main reason for this is that signator nations, often lead by the US, do not want them to be too enforceable, lest the treaty actually prevent them from doing on the sly what they have publically agreed not to do. It is one thing to come out with a ringing moral condemnation of, say, biological and chemical warfare, quite another to actually give up one's biological and chemical weapon-making capacity.

This is a bullshit argument, analogous to saying that the difficulty of enforcing a law against, say, distributing child pornography, is sufficient reason to discard the law. If these weapons are bad enough to condemn their creation and use, then they are bad enough to pass treaties against. The trick is not to throw out the treaty, but to give it teeth, and find ways to make it enforceable.

But, that would threaten the sovereignty of the signator nations. Well, of course it would: that's what treaties do. Treaties are the basis of international law, and like all laws they represent an agreement among free individuals, in this case states, to limit individual freedom for the good of the group. For much of human history, the group involved in a given treaty was small -- two, three or four nations. With the arrival and proliferation of nuclear weapons, the vast improvement in weapon technology and delivery, and the consequent globalisation of the consequences of a nation's war-making capability, the need for more far-reaching treaties, signed by many nations, became abundantly clear to a significant number of governments -- after some forceful demonstrations by the population.

The argument from sovereignty is also bullshit. Restated, it maintains that the individual state has the right to do as it pleases, and any agreement that interferes with that right can be ignored. Again, using the analogy of a more local law, this is the exact equivalent of saying that the individual has the right to ignore laws that limit his/her inherent right to do whatever s/he bloody well pleases. But, every law limits that right -- that is the whole point of the law. Without laws, every single one of us would have the right to take what s/he wanted from a neighbour, to impose our sexual will on whomever took our fancy, whether the other individual was willing or not, to set fire to the home of someone whose views we disagreed with, to torture and kill another human being if we felt so moved.

And this is not an exaggerated analogy: the United States is arguing that it has the right, whatever the rest of us might agree, to possess the power to force less well-armed countries to do its bidding with the mere threat of biological or nuclear weapons, to own and trade in the means of destruction of populations on a scale never before seen on earth. The present U.S. administration sees no value in co-operating with the other nations to reduce this power, this threat, any more than the neighbourhood psychopath sees the value in co-operating with his/her neighbours to increase the security of all.

If this administration gets away with it, we will be back in the jungle again, after decades, even centuries, of effort to escape.

Perhaps the U.S. has a point, though. Perhaps all these agreements do prevent it, and other nations, from protecting themselves from rogue nations. But, what, exactly, is a rogue nation? The Merriam-Webster American Collegiate dictionary defines rogue as:

1. vicious and destructive;
2. isolated and dangerous or uncontrollable.

It seems to me the Merriam-Webster makes a hell of a case that the rogue nation is the United States of America. The U.S. is fiercely aggressive toward its neighbours, undaunted by international law, armed to the teeth and dangerous. Increasingly, it is isolating itself from the community of nations in pursuit of unfettered sovereignty and the consequent economic and political power its wealth gives it. If it abrogates treaties, or simply refuses to be involved in any kind of multinational agreements that limit its powers, it will be uncontrollable.

In short, a rogue nation.

So, what argument does the United States have left for its attitude? Only the truth: the present U.S. administration prefers lawlessness to law because it knows the U.S. has the money, the weapons, and the ruthlessness to force the world into its service. It knows that, if the law of the jungle prevails, the U.S. will be the top predator.

The only way to prevent this from happening is for the rest of us to stand up, now, and refuse to go along with such a blatant power play. Write letters to the editor. Write and call your government. Tell them to sign the treaties anyway. Tell them to refuse to negotiate agreements with the U.S. in any other area unless it agrees to change its direction in this one. Tell them to abrogate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Refuse to buy U.S. goods. Boycott U.S. movies. Tell American tourists what you think. Tell everybody what you think. Do it. Now.

Yes, it will cost us something. Goods might get more expensive. The U.S. might make threatening noises about our exports. We might be attacked in their press. Tant pis: peace, order, and good government mean something, not just for Canada, but for the world.

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